Worry The Highlight begins like many good horror tales. A few friends–nerdy goody-goody Vivian and her goth pal Amy–sneak into faculty after-hours to carry out a séance. The varsity has a creepy historical past, in spite of everything, because of a hearth a number of years earlier that claimed the lives of a number of college students. It is a bit morbid and disrespectful to attempt to contact the spirits of a bunch of children within the faculty library, however hey, youngsters are morbid and disrespectful.
I performed a brief demo of Worry The Highlight at Summer season Recreation Fest 2024’s Play Days occasion, and at first, that was the factor that caught with me most–at least, at first. Sneaking via the halls of the varsity and listening to conversations between protagonist Vivian and Amy, the entire thing felt fairly pure and real looking. Goth child befriends nerd and the pair get into hassle together–I am certain lots of people have that precise backstory of their lives someplace.
Worry The Highlight matches a Nineties teen horror story with a Nineties survival-horror aesthetic. The sport calls up the look of early 3D video games on the unique PlayStation, most notably Silent Hill. The blocky, low-resolution visuals work properly with the darkish highschool setting, giving the entire sport an odd unreality that is excellent for a ghost story.
The sport, the product of the two-person, husband-and-wife crew Cozy Recreation Buddies, launched in a earlier type again in 2023. It has since been picked up for publishing by Blumhouse Video games, the online game arm of film manufacturing studio Blumhouse, and is re-releasing in Fall 2024 with further story content material. However regardless of having been round for 9 or so months, Worry The Highlight is not a sport I had clocked earlier than Summer season Recreation Fest, and after attempting it for a couple of minutes, I used to be upset I hadn’t heard of it earlier than.
The demo began with Vivian and Amy making their method via the halls and heading towards the library. Alongside the best way was a fast stealth section, through which the ladies ducked below a desk to keep away from the scanning eye of a surveillance digicam. That might be the highlight from the title, with staying within the shadows to keep away from being seen being a serious gameplay component.
Once we get to the library, we see the opposite main gameplay component: first-person puzzle-solving. Vivian units off to retrieve a spirit board (in any other case often called a Ouija board), which is saved in a glass show case within the library. To get it open, Vivian wants a key from the library’s workplace; to get into the workplace, she wants a keycard. Every time she interacts with a kind of components, the sport cuts from a third-person perspective to first-person. You information a cursor round a static model of the glass case to search out the elements you possibly can transfer or work together with. Touching the show’s lock, for instance, brings up Vivian’s stock to decide on an merchandise to make use of with it, like a key.
These interactive moments additionally provide you with alternatives to study extra concerning the world round you. Like in Resident Evil or Silent Hill, hitting the activation button on any of the opposite objects within the case brings up slightly little bit of textual content about them, giving a few of Vivian’s inside monologue about no matter she’s seeing or studying. A few of these moments are fairly insightful, giving a greater sense of Vivian and Amy’s relationship. Worry The Highlight appears to sport a excessive diploma of consideration to element in offering little tidbits that improve your understanding of the story. For example, when Vivian retrieves the keycard from the data desk, we uncover simply how massive a nerd Vivian actually is–it’s her personal keycard, as a result of she’s one of many library’s high scholar volunteers.
Vivian brings the spirit board to a desk the place Amy is ready, the place there’s one other little bit of first-person interactivity. When Amy passes you a e book of matches, you pull a pair out of your stock and light-weight the candles to start out the séance. Putting your cursor over the planchette and holding a button down simulates the best way you’d work together with the spirit board in actual life, however as Amy begins to ask questions, it begins to maneuver across the board erratically. A darkish determine seems behind Amy and the candles exit, plunging the room into pitch darkness.
From right here, Worry The Highlight takes a drastic flip, even for such a brief demo. I relight the candles slowly and painfully, dragging each from the match field individually. When the sunshine is lastly restored, it reveals that Amy is gone. Vivian grabs a candle to gentle the best way, and you can begin to stroll via the library looking for your misplaced good friend.
Even within the darkness, it quickly turns into clear that the library has modified. First, it is the trail again the best way you got here, with bookshelves turned over to dam the best way. Then, it begins to look just like the library itself has shifted to develop into bigger and extra winding. The house itself feels too massive. That is one other level when the old-school PlayStation graphics amplify the weirdness of Worry the Highlight. Checking down one pathway or one other, you usually see–or suppose you see–a determine within the darkness. Different occasions, you are undoubtedly chasing Amy via the stacks, however she one way or the other disappears within the unnatural house. Though there are loads of creepy issues occurring, in response to the press supplies shared for the sport, the spooks you may get from Worry The Highlight are atmospheric–no leap scares to fret about right here, if these aren’t your factor.
As Vivian calls to Amy and continues the search, a distant space of purple gentle seems and a silhouette inside it, however as we get shut it vanishes, and abruptly, hearth spreads via the library.
At this level, Worry The Highlight is off the rails. We hurry via the library fleeing the fireplace, however the room has absolutely twisted, bookshelves and tables giving technique to totally different partitions. Pink curtains hold forward, recalling the extradimensional Pink Room of the TV present Twin Peaks. As Vivian flees, the wall forward cracks open, tearing via the memorial plaque for the scholars killed within the hearth, making a pathway. Vivian flees into the crack and the digicam hangs again, specializing in the scholars’ photos–the faces have shifted from smiling college students to screaming demons.
It is there that Worry The Highlight’s demo ends, giving simply sufficient of a way of Worry The Highlight to be actually engaging. Whereas it is not sporting the form of depth the survival-horror video games it is channeling had been recognized for, the uncanny feeling created by the sport’s graphical fashion and artwork path pair completely with the spooky story the characters discover themselves in. The demo wasn’t fairly sufficient to get a full deal with on every part Worry The Highlight has to supply, nevertheless it did depart me desirous to see extra.
Worry The Highlight is ready for its re-release with a further one to 2 hours of recent content material, in response to its Steam web page, in 2024. It is coming to PC, PlayStation 4, PS5, Nintendo Change, Xbox Collection X|S, and Xbox 360.
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